Discussion

I love the app and the demo is amazing. Can't wait to try it out. Hopefully my overwhelming excitement won't cause clerks to give me weird looks. That may have been the case with my first Apple Watch payment 🙈
@roybrey and @aiouy, congrats on what you've accomplished so far! Curious where you think the ecosystem for mobile payments moves in the next few years and how Shake's market position evolves. Apple filed a patent for a reloadable wallet to be added to Apple Pay and mentioned bitcoin as a funding mechanism. Easy to imagine as Samsung/Android Pay struggle with emerging market bank APIs that difficult to work with, that they also push to have a function that allows funding through bitcoin.
If the major mobile wallets have bitcoin reloading, would that eliminate the need for Shake? Or does Shake take a unique place in the market through first-mover advantage? Mickey Malka from Ribbit Capital famously said that the most value created in financial services over the last 200 years has been through building and maintaining trust. If you become the trusted mobile wallet app in certain markets, that would drive a clear defensible position.

@realsimonburns hah! We're still getting the occasional nervous looks ourselves when we present our phones to pay.
There's a huge potential for bitcoin in the m-payment space, especially for p2p payments. To follow along what you said, banking infrastructure is just so underdeveloped and un-developer-friendly that building Shake would be a nightmare if we had to integrate with each country's financial infrastructure. I could very much see Apple & co becoming banks of their own to supersede many of these logistic headaches.
We tend to agree on your point regarding trust. We're particularly interested in making Shake as trustless of a service as we can. Integrating into a centralized system like credit/debit cards does require a minimal level of trust (loading funds for example) but apps like multi-sig wallets allow users to keep control of their funds at all times until the moment of transaction. There are a few other interesting models we're currently exploring that could not be built on the banking infrastructure :) You can read more on our blog: http://blog.shakepay.co/2016/bon...
On a separate note, kudos on Keza!

@eyaltoledano great to see you here!
The multi-currency feature is somewhat tricky to pull off. Having bitcoin as a funding system really allows us to be flexible with the currencies being transacted so we're able to do some magic behind the curtains. We haven't yet launched the multi-currency feature but we're aiming to bring it to our users towards the summer. Thanks for asking!

@bengtprice thanks for the feedback! It's very possible we end up having multi-currency cards in themselves so you won't have to issue one per currency; they will all be multi-currency. We'll have more to share towards the summer.